about the book
It is 1860, and the mean New York Streets are home to twelve-year-old twins, quick-tempered Alexander and thoughtful Cleopatra Dodge. After their widowed dad mysteriously vanished, the poor and desperate redheads join up with the malicious Black Hook Gang. Botching their first heist, Alex is thrown into jail, and his only recourse is to fink out the gang in exchange for tickets out of town.
With the gang hot on their heels, Alex and Cleo flee to New Orleans. There they learn a rich San Francisco Forty-Niner has placed an ad looking for his long-lost ginger-haired twin sons. The lost boys are about the same age as the Dodge twins, so Cleo cuts her hair boyishly short, adopts the name Pat, and the two scheme to hustle the old man.
But life just seems to keep throwing up road blocks. They run into two older twins, Silas and Edwin, who are planning the same caper! And before they can do much about this frustrating situation, Alex and Edwin are shanghaied, forced to work on a sailing ship heading to San Francisco via a long journey around Cape Horn.
Desperate to be reunited with her brother, Cleo and Silas stow away on a boat heading to New Granada and on through Panama. There she hopes to hop a train to San Francisco.
All four youngsters have rip-roaring adventures, two on the high seas and two in the deep dark jungles. They encounter double-dealers, crime, and pirates intent on getting a key to a lost treasure. A key that Alex and Cleo may have had all along. Could it be one of the heirlooms their mother left behind? Maybe it is the watch or the knife that once belonged to their father?
Will Cleo and Alex ever reunite? Can they evade the persistent Black Hook Gang and escape the dangerous pirates? Can they figure out the clues and find the treasure?
Maybe…if they live long enough!!!
about the author
Of German and Swedish descent, little Hope Larson was a fish out of water growing up in Asheville, North Carolina. She was a lonely, frustrated outcast, much like the characters she writes about now. Her dad was a professor, and when she was seven, he moved the family to France for a year. Hope knew zero French and became even more isolated. She turned to the comics she discovered all over Europe in bookstores, newsstands, and train stations.
She found herself reading about everything from Tintin and Astérix to My Little Pony, Archie, and Uncle Scrooge. When she got back to the U.S., she had no idea where to find her favorites. Comic book stores were not female friendly and superhero stuff freaked her out. In middle school she discovered the Elfquest collection and in high school she gravitated toward manga. She writes “I was an awkward weirdo teen and now I’m an awkward weirdo adult.”
While in college, comic artist Scott McCloud took an interest in her illustrations, encouraging her to try her hand at comics. Soon after, she was invited to submit to an anthology site and produced her first professional comic, a web serial entitled I Was There & Just Returned. After graduating from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2004, she moved to Toronto with her husband, Canadian cartoonist Bryan Lee O’Malley. After several more moves, the couple relocated to California where she and Bryon divorced in 2014.
Hope has gone on to write six graphic novels including her award-winning adaption of Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. She is quite proud of her newest graphic novel Compass South, an old-fashioned, swashbuckling pirate-y adventure that recalls the serialized radio dramas from the 1930s and ‘40s. Did you know that it can take three years or longer to write and illustrate a graphic novel?
Besides exploring screenwriting and doing illustrations for various clients, in 2006 this two-time Eisner Award winner launched her own publishing imprint, Tulip Tree Press. When not writing, blogging, or running a business, you can find her drinking overpriced coffee and making ice cream. She’s also a graduate of Penn State’s ice cream college!
Sources:
Author twitter site
Author biography: Wikipedia
Author biography: Graphic Novel Reporter
Author interview: Geek Dad
Author interview: CBR
Also by Hope Larson:
Knife’s Edge (Four Points, Book 2). Farrar Straus Giroux (BYR). June 2017.
Salamander Dream. Adhouse Books. 2005.
about the illustrator
Rebecca Mock was a huge art nerd as a kid. Though those memories are just a blur now, she does remember drawing a lot of dogs, fairies, and Archie comics. When she got older, she went to an arts middle school and high school. She graduated from the Maryland Institute College of Art with a BFA in illustration. That’s twelve years of art schools!
Her first job was doing backgrounds for animations. They were cityscapes full of harsh straight lines and she admits they were terrible. Today, she works digitally, collecting items, arranging them in groups, breaking them down into collective parts, and re-imaging them into what seems like simple, unusual scenes. Her office is a desktop computer, tablet, scanner, printer, and a table to draw comics and cut and construct zines. Part of her creative process is singing very loudly. She always has a sing-along playlist ready to go.
Now a freelance narrative-driven illustrator, comic book artist, and respected animator, she admits that she is extremely lucky to be constantly hired for fun, interesting assignments. Although her first love is comics, she specializes in GIFs (pronounced “jiffs”). These colorful, subtly atmospheric quirky images are part illustration and part animation. The still picture usually has just one or two moving parts that cycles over and over again. Her clients include The New Yorker, NY Times, Time, BBC Radio, Nautilus, Reader’s Digest, HBO, and Jet Blue.
Who knew you could grow up to make animated GIFs for a living? She even has an agent for such things. Rebecca didn’t expect to be working in so many different art fields at once. She just finished her first graphic novel, Compass South, written by Hope Larson.
Rebecca lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. In her downtime, Rebecca is still an avid comic, anime, and sci-fi nerd…and a know-it-all! She also has a passion for art history.
Sources:
Illustrator website
Illustrator interview: Report Hers
Illustrator interview: UCreative
Also by Rebecca Mock:
Knife’s Edge (Four Points, Book 2) with Hope Larson. Farrar Straus Giroux (BYR). June 2017.
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